Categories: uncategorized
Date: 01 September 2010 09:24:30
GB was a space for me to escape this year. A time to find normality and some certainty amid a sea of stress and uncertainty. As such I did v. little compared to many years. Little things provided much of the pleasure and thinking material this year. One example was queuing up for the bogs v. early in the morning and seeing my head of department, who I didn't expect to be about, brushing his teeth before going off to work in the area he was volunteering. To me this equality in a field summed up the whole ethos of the festival and what our Christian Community is about generally...a level playing field where everybody chips in whatever their "status" in the eyes of the "established order".
My favourite talk came from Fiona Joseph who did "Celebrating Beatrice Cadbury: the radical Quaker". The blurb described it well in the following way: "Why did the chocolate manufacturer’s daughter try to donate her inherited fortune to the Cadbury workers? This session will follow Beatrice Cadbury’s journey from respectable Quaker girl to radical anti-capitalist campaigner attempting her own form of the redistribution of wealth."
Clare Short spoke well on why we need to take up the Palastinian cause through taking the same approach as the anti-aparthied campaigners did with boycotts and disinvestment.
Theatre wise I saw lots of Applecart who varied between ok to quite good. They had a woman involved with them this time and she was v.g.
The generally controversial but rather good communion service was more traditional and straightforward than in many previous years and I think benefitted from this. The one amusing thing was that after the confession the guy on stage says, "great, now we're all straight, we can carry on". Seeing as a fair number of those I was sitting with were from the LGBT community this did raise a laugh in our corner of the field.
All in all a low key, but enjoyable GB.....roll on next year.